1 The History Boys
What should secondary-school education be? Should it be a boot camp for
acing exams and gaining entrance to a top university? Or an open-ended
movable feast designed to nourish students' souls for the rest of their
lives? It isn't long into The History Boys before you know where
playwright Alan Bennett stands on that question. He sets up the opposing
philosophies — heavily favoring the latter, of course — by putting them in
the mouths of two metaphorically drawn instructors at a boys' school in
England during Maggie Thatcher's '80s heyday. Silver-tongued tutor Irwin
(Stephen Campbell Moore) teaches a group of impressionable lads that
history is whatever they need it to be, while poor, befuddled Hector
(Richard Griffiths) rants and rages against that kind of supercynical
pragmatism. Far from making Hector a paragon, Bennett writes him as a
tortured romantic whose fondness for his students spills over into
fondling and gets him into tragic trouble. The great felicity of this
Tony-winning Broadway production (which you can catch some sense of in
the film version, starring the same sublime cast) wasn't just that the
arguments felt rough and real instead of schematic. It was that the show
seemed perfectly relevant to test-obsessed American educational policy
in the age of Dubya.
2 Grey Gardens Broadway
What could have been an exercise in kitsch — a musical version of the cult
1976 documentary about eccentric Jackie O. relatives living in a
squalid, vermin-filled Hamptons mansion — emerges as a compelling work of
art. As the ravishing Christine Ebersole transforms from domineering
society mom Edith in the '40s-set first act into wrecked daughter Edie,
still grappling (and flag waving) for mother's approval, we see the
evolution of madness and the decrepit underside of America's dream of
Camelot.
3 Voyage Broadway
Voyage is the difficult, thrilling first play (followed by Shipwreck and
Salvage) in Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, an eight-hour cycle
about — stay with us here! — 19th-century Russian thinkers. Like his other
works, it's full of big, ungainly ideas, but they're illuminated by
something we don't often see in Stoppard: genuine spectacle. Jack
O'Brien's staging is formidable, breathtaking even, and he's corralled
the year's best cast (Billy Crudup, Ethan Hawke, Brían F. O'Byrne, et
al.). The ambition on display is staggering.
4 Company Broadway
Say what you will about the logic of sophisticated New Yorkers
promenading with woodwinds. This show's emotional payoff — perpetual
singleton Bobby (the glorious Raúl Esparza) realizes that what he wants,
more than anything, is someone to vary his days — made any suspension of
belief well worth it. And for the second straight year (after 2005's
Sweeney Todd), director John Doyle's high-concept reworking of a
Sondheim classic made us happily rethink what a Broadway musical could
be.
5 Rabbit Hole Broadway
When faced with the death of a child, do you move on but never let
go...or erase the past but never move on? David Lindsay-Abaire's play
navigated this treacherous territory with grace, wringing devastating
performances out of Cynthia Nixon and John Slattery as a bitterly
grieving wife and her warm but desperate husband. Tyne Daly, there for
comic relief, delivered a climactic speech about loss that left us
breathless, and the tender threads of Lindsay-Abaire's script hung with
us for months.
